


Whistle Past the Graveyard

by Shachaai



Series: Ill-Met By Moonlight [1]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Casual Murder, Desecration of dead bodies, Ghosts, Graphic descriptions of corpses, M/M, Multi, Nudity, Sex, Things That Go Bump in the Night (and Frequently the Daytime Too), Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, and some cute snuggling, blood-drinking, decomposition of human and animal flesh, descriptions of mild and severe injuries, general disregard/casual attitude towards death and the dead, merfolk
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 12:36:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18851209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shachaai/pseuds/Shachaai
Summary: ...And ghosts will follow you home.EngPort modern day werewolf/vampire AU. Arthur is a werewolf who once ‘belonged’ to Gabriel, a vampire lord. Once they got over being asses to one another, they embarked upon a relationship - that only improved when Gabriel released Arthur from service, and Arthur chose to stay with Gabriel and Gabriel’s House of his own volition.Only now someone - or something- seems very determined to kill Gabriel and hurt those he holds dear, a grudge from long, long ago doing its best to ruin his peaceful life and love now. Not to mention his lawn, which is now developing a terrible tendency to acquire rotting body parts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hoofae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hoofae/gifts).



> This is the sequel/continuation(?)/expansion to an AU fic that died with my other stories on some faulty hardware Halloween 2015, but I hope what there is here will mostly still stand up by itself. Now finally crossposted to AO3. The intent _is_ to go back and rewrite that lost fic, as well as include the other stories that expand this 'verse, at some point, but we'll see.
> 
> As ever, this is for tumblr user Hoofae, because this AU is 200% her fault. At the time of the initial fic, there was a prevalence of suave!vampire!England always appearing with either demonic/werebeast!Iberibros. I wanted to write a fic switching those dynamics around, and the dear Hoof deserved a Halloween fic.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a dug-up Frankensteinian corpse on the lawn. Vampires and werewolves aren’t unaccustomed to dead bodies, but they shouldn’t look like a mutilated decomposing ragdoll and be on the freshly-mown grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel is Portugal, and his House is composed of former Portuguese and Spanish colonies and territories (plus Veneziano and Seborga, because they wanted to be with their brother).  
> Luciano/Lu is Brazil  
> Renata/Rê is Mozambique
> 
>  
> 
>  **Warnings:** NSFW for blood, blood-drinking, nudity, sex, bad injuries, casual murder, decomposition of human and animal flesh, desecration of dead bodies and general disregard for/casual attitude towards death and the dead. Seriously, there are abused and rotting corpses described in detail here.

**Terminology and Fact File:**  


  * _Vampire_ : a humanoid immortal-unless-killed being. _Not_ one of the undead; vampires very much live and breathe, though they are incapable of procreating. A vampire can only be made from a Turned human. Vampires technically do not need to consume blood to survive - and in fact _should_ to consume ‘normal’ food for the best health -, but not drinking blood greatly weakens them. Much like a newborn vampire, a vampire who has not consumed blood for a while can, potentially, go insane with the desire for blood, and if a vampire does not consume blood for long enough, they will eventually fall into lethargy and then a sleep that will only break if they are fed blood. Vampires in this comatose state tend to shrivel up. All vampires have better-than-human hearing and sense of smell, but it is only really reliable hearing and smelling those things most closely related to things to do with feeding on blood (e.g, smelling prey, hearing heartbeats or fangs in flesh). They all have very good night-vision, but _terrible_ vision in the day: the sun hurts their eyes, and hurts more the younger a vampire is. Consequently, most vampires only really go out in daylight if necessary, and keep their business to night. Vampires grow more powerful and gain supernatural ‘gifts’ the older they get: not all are documented, but the most common one usually allows them to walk up walls and across ceilings. They have swift and miraculous self-healing.
  * _House:_ the collective term for a formal group of vampires, led by a lord they swear allegiance to, and usually of one bloodline or closely-related. It is not uncommon for loner vampires to join a House, but nobody but a lord creates a new House. The term, House, is always capitalised to distinguish it from a house where people live. 
  * _Lord:_ the term (in English) for the leader of a vampire House, who are always extremely powerful vampires. Whether they become lords because they are powerful or they become powerful because they are lords is unclear, because how someone _becomes_ a vampire lord is a very closely-guarded secret. The term is unisex. All vampires in a House swear allegiance to their lord, and share something like a biased emotional psychic link with them: the House vampires can ‘inform’ their lord of their emotions and basic state, but their lord can do that and alter their moods to a certain degree with psychic pressure.
  * _Werewolf:_ a humanoid mortal being that can shift, usually at will, parts or the whole of their body between the form of a human and the form of an unnaturally large wolf. Without outside interference, all werewolves compulsively shift into their wolf forms on the night of a full moon, and the night either side of a full moon. This also applies to very young werewolves, who have less control over their shifting until around their fourth or fifth birthdays. Werewolves have the finest sense of hearing and smell of any humanoid being, in either form - although both are always at their best in wolf form. They also have better-than-human night-vision, and greater-than-human strength and speed. A well-trained werewolf (and particularly an alpha) can fight toe-to-toe and sometimes defeat a vampire lord. The life expectancy of a werewolf is slightly shorter than the average for humans with a similar background to them, but werewolves can be Turned from humans _or_ born via sexual intercourse with a human or another werewolf. The werewolf offspring born to two werewolf parents is know as a pure-breed, and tends to be stronger than both a half-breed (only one werewolf parent) and a Turned werewolf. Werewolves’ injuries heal at a faster rate than humans.
  * _Pack:_ the collective term for a group of werewolves, but it can also be used to describe _any_ group that a werewolf considers their family group. Packs can be any size, from a few people to an entire community. A pack is always led by an alpha or alpha couple, who are the strongest and most influential in their community and who mitigate and solve the problems brought to them by the rest of the pack. The most common pack demographics are usually two-thirds werewolf, and one-third human - both Gifted humans (such as witches) and mundane. There is nearly always at least _one_ witch in a modern werewolf pack.



 

 

* * *

 

 

Gabriel doesn’t lock his door. Nobody - well, hardly anybody with half a brain or more - would disturb a vampire lord without a really good reason, but enough really good reasons exist that it’s better to leave his private quarters unlocked (especially since the whole House knows their lord can blissfully sleep through an individual beeper, a doorbell/buzzer, a ringing telephone and/or alarm clock, and a shrieking fire alarm - with accompanying fire).

Good reason or not, Antonio _hates_ having to go into his brother’s rooms to wake Gabriel up. Gabriel has gotten a lot _tetchier_ about being disturbed from his rest ever since he got his new werewolf bedpet, but Arthur, the highly territorial werewolf in question, is even _worse_ \- moody when awoken, _furious_ when disturbed during intimacies, and prone to pouncing on and snapping at intruders in his lupine form. Antonio point-blank refuses to wake his brother on the nights when Arthur is forcibly transformed: the full moon, and the nights either side. He might get something valuable bitten off.

Luckily, the moon is currently waning - or. It would be, if the autumn sun weren’t still hanging low in the sky. Antonio’s eyes hurt somewhat from being woken up early and dragged out into the last of the daylight to deal with a _problem -_ and so he has a very cheerful headache building up behind his eyebrows, right as he has to go wake his lord and brother up to tell him all about their unique problem of the night.

Fortunately for Antonio, Gabriel is already awake. _Un_ fortunately for Antonio, it seems Gabriel has been awake for _a while,_ for when Antonio marches himself into his brother’s bedroom without knocking (he’d knocked on the antechamber’s door! With no response!) he walks straight into a fog of salt and iron and musk that he _really_ wishes he wasn’t so familiar with.

Both Gabriel and Arthur are very naked, their bedsheets a mess on the floor and sweat (among other bodily substances Antonio _is not looking at_ ) still drying on their skin. Tangled up in one another, it’s a little hard to tell where the vampire ends and the werewolf begins, particularly as Gabriel’s head is bent, his loose hair tumbling over Arthur’s shoulder and his fangs sunk greedily into Arthur’s unusually bare throat. The evening sun makes them both strangely shadowed, golden creatures, saints and sinners both - Arthur blissfully boneless from his post-orgasmic haze being mixed with the cocktail of endorphins that vampires can inject when they feed (what their kind playfully refer to as a _love-bite_ ), and Gabriel all but _radiating_ sated satisfaction from sex and feeding and the rush of feeding immediately _after_ sex, half-drugged from his own endorphins and adding his partner’s post-coital trip on top of that.

 _“Santa María madre de Dios.”_ Antonio slaps one hand over his face, but not before the image in front of him has _seared_ another scar into the back of his brain. (He has _centuries_ of this shit traumatising him. _Centuries._ )

There is the slow, slick, and incredibly intimate sound of wet fangs sliding from warm flesh, a barely-there sound that all vampires _know_ with every thump of their heart. Antonio’s fangs elongate a little at the sound of it, at the iron smell growing stronger in the room, sharp edges pressing thoughtfully against his tongue inside his mouth.

And then Gabriel’s bloody growl at being disturbed: _“Antonio._ ”

“Hermano, there is a _problem,_ ” Antonio protests, still keeping his hand firmly over his eyes. He only has so much trauma-room to spare. “You need to come deal with it. Preferably with clothes on?”

Gabriel sighs at him, and the remains of the bed-linen rustles. “Will somebody die if I am not there in the next five minutes?”

“No imminent death? Just. You need to hear about it? And I can do something about it maybe while you go wash.” Another soft wet sound that is only too simple for vampires to identify - a tongue on skin, against seeping blood, languidly lapping against a recent bite to help it heal. “Hermano, can you maybe not do that when I am standing _right here?_ Por favor?”

“Go stand somewhere else then,” is Arthur’s first input of the evening, his voice thick and lazy. Gabriel snorts.

Antonio can hear _skin on skin_ now, and pouts dramatically in the general direction of the bed. “It is _important._ ”

“ _Sim,_ sí…” Gabriel sighs, and the bed-linen rustles again. “Five minutes, Toni.”

Antonio takes the offered opportunity to escape to his brother’s outer room, almost slamming the bedroom door behind him.

True to his word - if only probably because Arthur kicked him out before Antonio could go back in the bedroom again -, Gabriel emerges from his bedroom just under five minutes later. He has found underwear, trousers and a clean shirt - though the shirt is completely unbuttoned, open to show the long scratch of nails ( _claws_ ) that goes from over his shoulders down to the soft of his belly. He still has the blush of the freshly-fed; the blood-flush is high in his cheeks and his hazel eyes are only slowly losing their crimson shade.

Antonio draws the line and makes a put-out face when he sees Gabriel idly running his tongue over his fangs, licking them clean of the last of his meal. “ _Must_ you?”

Gabriel makes a face right back at him. “Do I criticise what you do in _your_ bedroom?”

“Yes!”

Gabriel considers that one, before reaching out with one hand to ruffle up Antonio’s hair. “…Lordship and big brother privileges.”

Antonio ducks, unimpressed. “Que te folle un _pez,_ hermano.”

“You would probably want to be a voyeur for that too,” Gabriel grumbles, although he brightens a little when his bedroom door opens again and Arthur comes out, opening his arms for Arthur to step into.

Arthur walks straight past him and heads for the mini-fridge in the room, taking out a bottle of water and cracking it open as he ignores Gabriel’s pout. “Who’s the voyeur?” He glances at Antonio with the eternal eyes of the unimpressed, adding after a swig of his drink: “It better be you.”

“Who in this house is _not_ an unwilling voyeur, the way you two go at it?” Antonio’s nose feels like it is going to be stuck in permanent wrinkle that night. Rather than something fresh, Arthur’s clothes are what he was wearing the _other_ night, his skin still scented with sex although his collar is neatly rebuckled high around his throat. “Have an orange or something; I am not catching you if you swoon.”

Arthur rolls his eyes at him, but obligingly sets down his water bottle to reach out for one of the clementines Gabriel keeps in a bowl in his room pretty much exactly for the purpose of feeding his werewolf between mealtimes. Before his nails dig into the waxy rind, however, he pauses, sniffing the air suspiciously before peering back at Antonio. “…You smell like decomposing meat.” He sniffs again, and then his whole face creases up in disgust. (At last, someone understands how Antonio is feeling.) “ _Rancid_ decomposing meat. Please tell me that’s no-one’s dinner?”

Arthur’s not wrong, but it’s still not a nice thing to be informed of. Antonio puffs up his cheeks. “You don’t need a wolf’s nose to identify what _you two_ smell of, and I’m doing my best not to think about it.” Five minutes is not long enough for either Arthur or Gabriel to have washed, but they _could_ have used some deodorant.

“Oh dear, did big brother not give you The Talk when you were a little baby bat?”

“Play nice,” Gabriel murmurs, having found his way to Arthur’s side again, his hand settling on Arthur’s elbow and trying to steer the recalcitrant werewolf down onto a nearby sofa. “He was right about you needing to eat.”

“Well if he hadn’t disturbed us I could be quite happily making you go fetch me a bacon sandwich right now -” Gabriel shoots Arthur a quelling look, which Arthur, for once, actually heeds. He sits down on the sofa, one leg folded in a sharp point across the opposites knee. “ _Fine_ ,” he says, rather shortly, and begins unpeeling his clementine at last, though his green eyes are daggers at Antonio. “I assume your problem _is,_ as you said before, actually important?”

“Ah,” says Antonio, and rubs the back of his head with one hand. “It’s about the meat smell.”

Gabriel frowns at him. “You disturbed me because of a _smell?_ ”

“ _Pues -_ ” Antonio can see fangs. They don’t look pleased. “It is more what is _causing_ the smell, _¿sabes?_ There is a dead body on the lawn.”

“Jesus Christ -” Arthur coughs, almost choking on a segment of his fruit. He whacks himself on the chest with his closed fist, waiting until he gets his breath back before speaking again. “You should’ve started with the _dead body,_ not the smell!”

“Antonio.” Gabriel is rubbing his forehead the way he does when he has a headache coming on. _Good._ Antonio has a headache, and is feeling very abused right now. “ _Why_ is there a dead body on the lawn?”

Antonio shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“ _How_ is it on the lawn?”

“I don’t know _that_ either.” Eh… Antonio holds up his hand, ticking off his points on his thumb and fingers. “I can answer the _when, where, who_ and _what_ questions, but the _why_ and _how_ are a no?”

“Those are the most important ones!” Arthur bursts out.

“I’m a vampire, not _psychic_.” Werewolves have the weirdest ideas about what they think vampires can do. And Arthur is a weird werewolf on _top_ of that, and Antonio is just tired. “I reviewed the security footage and _poof!_ We suddenly have a dead body on our lawn at six forty-two this evening, like magic.”

“So magic then?” Gabriel.

Antonio shrugs again, because he just doesn’t know. He’s about as magical as he is psychic. “I have people checking to see if our feeds have been tampered with in case not.”

“When, where, what…” Arthur’s voice is going a little rough around his vowels, enough that Gabriel none-too-subtly passes him his open bottle of water. Arthur takes it automatically. “ _Who_ is it?”

“Nobody important.” Which makes the guy’s dead body showing up _twice_ as inconvenient. Antonio has had to look at _paperwork_ this evening. “He was the liquid dinner at the ball last week.”

Even Arthur, who likes to make his mouth go about vampiric eating habits, loses some of the pinched concern in his face at that. Vampires in Gabriel’s House may feed on anyone in their lord’s territory as they like, as long as they do it discreetly, but they are forbidden from killing or transforming others without permission, except in self-defence or to save a life. And the only people Gabriel ever gives permission to kill are those unfortunates who get ‘blessed’ with a one-way ‘invitation’ to the House’s buffet table for a party or ball.

Nobody ends up as a meal in Gabriel’s home without the research being done on their background first, and Gabriel’s research finds all the filthiest dregs of humanity that have escaped human justice to apply justice of his own. Murderers, rapists, child-abductors… Gabriel’s House makes them disappear, a blessing for everyone in his territory, and his family get full bellies.

Dinner is not supposed to come up a second time though.

Gabriel is frowning. “I thought he was disposed of, like usual?”

“He was,” says Antonio.

“Stripped of useful organs, chopped up into little unidentifiable pieces and buried in twelve different locations with acid poured over the remains?”

“Sí,” says Antonio. He had overseen it, right up to the chopped up into _tiny_ tiny chunks of former person part.

“Then if he was coated in acid and buried in twelve different locations after being chopped up into little unidentifiable pieces,” Antonio winces, bracing himself a little when his brother’s lips pull back from his fangs in a horrible snarl, “ _how_ is he in enough of a whole piece for his _identifiable corpse to be dumped on_ my lawn _like a unwanted plastic flamingo?!”_

“I _like_ plastic flamingos,” Antonio says somewhat forlornly, because he _does -_ but rethinks taking the conversation on a detour when Gabriel’s snarl deepens in the back of his throat and takes on an ugly serrated _edge._ “Because it looks like someone has stitched all those pieces together with industrial strength steel wire.” Therefore _this is not his fault,_ and Gabriel should stop making that noise that vibrates Antonio’s teeth and bones and is perilously close to triggering his instinctive vampiric need to apologise to his aggrieved lord _._ “Like a big jigsaw treasure hunt. With maggots.”

“…You know,” says Arthur, lowering the water bottle he’d just finished emptying (and Antonio feels a rush of unwanted gratefulness towards him because his absent comment has Gabriel’s snarl abruptly cut-off like someone has suddenly slammed down a sound-proof door between them, an immediate heavy _pressure_ lifting off of Antonio’s nerves), “when someone puts that much effort into something, it’s usually personal.”

Antonio looks at his brother.

Gabriel is already looking back at Antonio.

Antonio shrugs.

Gabriel turns and frowns down at his werewolf. “How can it be personal? I barely knew the man.”

“You had him _killed?_ ” Despite the questioning tone in his voice, Arthur does not look as though he is actually asking the question his words implicitly mean. To be honest, he looks more like someone questioning his own sanity for still sitting beside someone who is just looking at him blankly. “Some people get upset about these things. _Some people,_ ” Arthur quickly adds, when Gabriel opens his mouth to speak, “get upset when these things happen to their friends and family.”

“He murdered his family.” It’s why the human is dead.

“Then forget I spoke.” Arthur dismisses the comments with a wave of his hand, gathering up his clementine’s peel and rising to his feet. “I’m going for a shower.”

Antonio can actually _see_ the moment 90 percent of thoughts about corpses immediately falls out of his brother’s head (pushed out about thoughts of much more _living_ bodies), which is, frankly, _gross._ And it is even _more_ gross that he’s gotten so used to having Arthur around, and having Arthur around _his brother,_ that Antonio can so easily see it.

 _“Gabi,_ ” Antonio appeals, because he can’t bring himself to use his personal replacement for _lord_ right now: _hermano._ Really, Gabriel keeps _doing_ these things, and Antonio is standing _right there._

Their dear mother in heaven better be saving up a lot of scolding for Gabriel when they all finally meet their final night.

Gabriel just looks put-out and pouty at Antonio’s mostly wordless appeal - but he braces himself, thankfully putting his mind back on the job (as his gaze noticeably _lifts_ from where it had been studying his pet’s ass as Arthur had been putting his peel in the bin). “Meu coração, we could do with your nose coming with us,” he says to Arthur, noticeably trying to sound coaxing when the werewolf looks unimpressed. “It can sometimes find things more accurately than our eyes and security footage.”

“You want me to sniff a week-old maggot-infested corpse?” Somehow, Arthur manages to _sound_ even more unimpressed than he looks - this once, Antonio will agree with the sentiment (as a favour repaid for before), as he has seen and _smelled_ the corpse in question.

Gabriel can snarl, but there is little fighting against flatness. “…It would move it off the lawn more quickly?”

“…I’m getting a shower,” Arthur says firmly. “I smell of _you,_ and frankly you - and your suggestions - are beginning to stink.”

_“Arthur -”_

Arthur makes a face at Gabriel’s beseeching tone - or perhaps at Antonio’s face at Gabriel using a beseeching tone, for Gabriel has turned down other vampire lords with less emotion in his voice than the tone he uses for this baby werewolf -, his hand already on the bedroom’s doorknob. “Corpses after cleanliness.”

Antonio protests. “What am I supposed to do with the dead man while _you_ have a scrub?”

“It’s a dead body,” says Arthur, and disappears inside the bedroom. His voice floats back: “Unless there’s a necromancer on the property you haven’t noticed yet, it’s hardly going to get up and walk off, is it?”

“Just put a tent up over it for now,” Gabriel says somewhat distractedly to Antonio, already moving to go after his pet. “ _Arthur_ , you should not shower alone after giving blood; you might faint and drown -”

Antonio abruptly takes that as his cue to leave, giving up on both his brother and the werewolf and going to see if they actually _have_ a small tent somewhere on the estate that might be suitable for putting up over a rotting corpse.

   
   
   
  

 

Twenty minutes and Gabriel being made to wait to use the shower _after_ his lover later, Arthur’s temper is hardly sweeter. To Gabriel’s extreme relief, however, Arthur has put away all the sharp edges on him apart from his tongue, his clothes freshly-washed but soft and old ( _“I’m not wearing something_ new _to poke around a dead body”_ ), worn navy t-shirt and tattered jeans clinging softly to the damp apple-scented skin on his shoulder-blades, over his hips. His blonde hair is still tousled from the towel he’d rubbed it with, strands still sticking to his nape even though the rest has been fluffed up to look like an aggrieved baby bird, and the backs of his knuckles are warm when they occasionally brush against Gabriel’s bare forearm as they walk together, side by side. For Arthur, it’s as good as holding hands.

(Gabriel is so pleased about _almost_ having his hand held he cheerfully ignores his own hair dripping wet and unrepentant down the back of his collar, shirt and spine.)

The evening sun is low enough that Gabriel doesn’t bother with his sunglasses to go outside, pleased to watch the red and golds and purples in the clouds above without tinted shades changing the gorgeous colours before they reach his eyes. The trees in the gardens of the large estate that his House calls their home are full of little birds quickly flitting home to their nests before nightfall, the breeze moving gently through the leaves and sending a few spiralling down to the earth below.

The white marquee tent fluttering on the lawn is a less pleasant sight, if only because Gabriel knows what’s waiting inside of it. Since Antonio has gone back inside to terrorise their people in charge of security footage, he has left other vampires on guard duty. Gabriel has no idea what Luciano and Renata have done to offend Antonio so much - this time - that they are the two that have been stationed outside the marquee’s entrance flap, though Renata certainly looks grossed out enough she likely won’t be doing whatever she did _again,_ and Luciano has his face firmly hid inside his jacket’s collar, resentfully covering his nose.

“It cannot be _that_ bad,” Gabriel calls to both of them from a few metres away, raising his hand in a greeting wave.

Renata’s answering smile is strained, her black braids swinging around her cheeks when she turns to look at him. “With respect, lord -”

“ _Y_ _ou_ smell it,” Luciano says, ripping back the entrance flap’s velcro beside him so the entrance opens.

Gabriel can’t actually smell anything; the breeze is too mild. Sweetness maybe? It’s easily ignorable, as autumn usually smells at least a little of rot. Arthur, however, stops dead, an audibly retching _gulp_ caught in his throat as he pulls his hand away from Gabriel’s and slams both palms over his mouth and nose, turning slightly green.

By the marquee, Renata hisses something about Luciano being _insensitive,_ and the two begin a furious conversation in whispers.

Gabriel steps between Arthur and the tent, sliding his hands around Arthur’s back to pull Arthur a little way into his chest. Despite his caustic protestations otherwise at times, Arthur seems to be fond of his scent (it has to smell better than a rotting corpse, anyway), and Gabriel can rub his hands slowly, soothingly, up and down his werewolf’s back, trying to ease some of the nausea away.

Arthur loosens up by cautious inches, losing the tight grip on his face when Gabriel touches his lips to his brow, turning his face into Gabriel’s neck. His warm breath skates over Gabriel’s collarbone, carefully taking in the scent of Gabriel, of the air beyond.

“Still want that bacon sandwich?” Gabriel asks, and Arthur makes a disgusted _ugh_ noise in his arms.

“If you could smell even _half_ of what I can smell right now, you wouldn’t be joking about that.” Arthur brings his hands up for a moment, touching the dripping wet of Gabriel’s curls where they stick to his throat. “Didn’t you dry your hair at _all_ before you came out?”

“No time,” Gabriel informs him. “Later.”

“And _later_ you’ll have caught a cold and be whining and snuffling and wanting sympathy until I want to smother you with a pillow.”

Gabriel huffs, wrinkling up his nose when Arthur’s hair feathers ticklishly across it. “At least when _I_ sneeze I do not leave a big glob of green wolf-snot in a guest’s new scarf.”

“No,” Arthur counters, “when _you_ sneeze in the middle of a rant about me sneezing on a goddamn scarf, you fall off the ceiling on top of the roast chicken. _And_ break the dining table.”

“It was a terrible dining table.”

“It was from the _eighteenth century!”_

“And probably _exhausted_ by its centuries of service.” Gabriel slides his hands around to Arthur’s hips, as he has been wanting to do since he first saw Arthur in this t-shirt. The cloth is worn thin by time and use, radiating heat from the shower-warm skin beneath it. “I can get you a new dining table.”

Arthur’s pulse picks up. “I couldn’t give a _shit_ about the dining table; you wrecked it ages ago. What I cared about, at the time, was the _chicken._ ” He pushes at Gabriel’s chest, hard enough Gabriel blinks down at him. “Why can I never have a regular mealtime?”

“Do you think I _plan_ all these interruptions?” Gabriel asks, wounded. Because he’d been quite enjoying himself that afternoon, lazily tangled up in bed with a warm and willing lover. He’d’ve fetched Arthur a _hundred_ bacon sandwiches to stay there, even if that would have meant chasing crumbs out of the sheets for the next month.

“My stomach’s trying to _eat_ itself, whether they’re planned or not.” Arthur’s face twists up again, looking with some disgust over Gabriel’s shoulder towards the marquee - and the no-doubt watching-but-pretending-otherwise vampires there. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Taking his cue from Luciano, Gabriel covers up his mouth and nose with his shirt collar (and wishes he’d worn a thicker shirt) before ducking into the marquee after Arthur. Although it’s big enough to host a small and lavish midnight tea party, the marquee is not the largest tent they have on the property, and the smell of rotting meat has filled it thoroughly. The air is thick with the stench since so little breeze is passing through, and Gabriel gags automatically when it hits him.

Vampires only consume _fresh_ blood. Exsanguinated rancid flesh is an anathema to a vampire’s stomach - and health, if consumed. Then again, rancid flesh does terrible things to nearly _any_ type of creature that eats it, save perhaps ghouls.

“Still going to joke about bacon sandwiches?” Arthur asks him, crouched on the grass and fiddling with one of the unlit electric lamps Antonio seems to have rather sensibly ordered placed inside the tent. There’s still plenty of light in the sky to see by, but the shadows are long and lose details inside themselves, especially when the slow sunset is muted coming through the marquee’s sides.

“No,” Gabriel swallows the acid taste of bile at the back of his throat, though the heady tang of iron remains heavy on his tongue - his earlier meal, Arthur’s blood. The air smells sharp around it. “Although…” he casts his eye across the corpse spread out on the grass, the pale squiggling movements he knows to be maggots even _before_ Arthur switches the light on, “this brings an entirely new meaning to bringing up one’s lunch.”

Arthur groans at him. “ _Please_ don’t make me waste anymore of my energy smacking you before dinner.”

The light flicks on. Startled flies immediately take off from where they had been crawling off the dead body, Arthur waving them away from himself in revulsion when they fly too close to his face.

The corpse in question had once been a white middle-aged man, one Mr. David Argyl. Blood type O-. According to the House’s investigation into him, he had grown tired of his sick and elderly mother’s continuing life and emotional dependency upon him, especially when she had had a great fortune for him to inherit written into her will. After taking her to the doctors to investigate the state of her memory, he had deliberately overdosed her, and successfully claimed in the ensuing human investigation that his mother had accidentally overdosed _herself -_ her mind had been going in her old age, the poor thing.

Now - well. Perhaps _now_ Mr. Argyl is at last as rotten outside as he was on the inside in life. After serving his fresh blood for their dinner table, Gabriel’s House had cut him open for his valuable insides, for what the human black market won’t take, the magical and supernatural black market certainly _will._ Following standard routine, the rest of the body had been hacked into the smallest pieces, dropped in sulphuric acid for a while, and then taken out to at _least_ twelve different locations to be buried - and burial involved dropping the chunk of corpse in a deep hole, where it was coated in _more_ acid, buried some way, and then had some kind of dead animal buried on top of it. They kept roadkill in the morgue especially for the job.

That someone has found and dug up enough of Mr. Argyl to _stitch him together again_ shows the world is full of people with a grim sense of humour and remarkable perseverance… and iron-clad stomachs, because Gabriel has seen _ghouls_ that look more humanoid than the corpse now laying on his lawn. All over the hairless flesh is greenish-blue and grotesquely bloated from the few gases left trapped inside the limbs, chunks of skin and muscle eaten into in places by acid and bugs - if sharp stones have not torn away the rotting matter already. Buried in different soils, the different body parts have decomposed at different rates - in some places, stringy muscles shine slickly in the light, and the entire chest cavity is lumpy and swollen. The nose has collapsed entirely into the face; one thigh has bloated up pale and purplish as a pufferfish from watery soil, and one hand has scraps of skin covering only its palm and thumb. Two of the fingers on that hand are missing entirely, and the other two gleam with sick yellowish bone.

Like something out of Doctor Frankenstein’s worst nightmares, the pieces of a former man have been sewn together with thick, industrial-strength steel wire. The stitches are tight, pulling all the ragged edges of flesh together that they can, but clumsy, with little care for uniformity or whether they pass through skin or bone: one stitch has punctured the remains of one of Mr. Argyl’s eyeballs, recently enough that the crushed sclera is still a wet jelly (thankfully) caking the thin eyelid to his cheek. (There are flies in the socket. The eyelid bulges with a _buzz_ when Arthur holds the light too close.)

Gabriel cannot think of a single person who could’ve managed - or would’ve _wanted_ to manage - this.

“You should put on gloves,” he says to Arthur, and is swallowing down bile again even as he reaches up with his hand to cover his own, blessedly whole, eye. Empathy for a corpse. (A vampire can recover from a crushed eyeball, regrow it even; Gabriel has known vampires who have. But the _agony_ of it… one had gone completely mad.)

Arthur looks up at him, looks like he’s going to say something terribly _dry_ at how very close Gabriel feels to vomiting, then changes his mind. “Gloves?”

“Gloves,” Gabriel repeats. There is a box of protective laboratory gloves in the corner of the tent, beside one of the lights. His mouth is filling with saliva, trying to stave off the bile or remind him of better tastes. Arthur’s blood. Blood. Blood. Arthur’s blood, not this corpse’s anymore. “The body… sulphuric acid will burn you. If you touch.”

Arthur sets down his light, pushing himself up from his crouch. “What is this, _CSI_?” Gabriel grimaces at him. “…Would you rather talk outside?”

Gabriel _would,_ but his vampiric pride rankles at the thought of being unable to stomach something a _werewolf_ appears to be dealing with. “We would just have to come back in again. Besides, there is nothing to look at outside except for two young vampires on the metaphorical naughty step.”

“We can _hear_ you!” Luciano yells from outside the marquee, no doubt puffed-up in indignation.

“You were _supposed_ to!” Gabriel calls back to him, glad of the distraction, only to raise his eyebrow at the _particular_ kind of amused look Arthur is giving him as the werewolf pulls on a pair of gloves. “What? If I cannot tease him after almost four centuries, what is the point of having him?”

Arthur just shakes his head. “One of these days he’s going to strangle you with your own rosary.”

 _“Kinky,_ ” Gabriel remarks cheerfully - and gets the box of laboratory gloves tossed at him with extreme prejudice. He puts on a pair of his own - just because he can heal from acid burns does not mean he wants to waste time and energy _doing_ so - and joins Arthur closer to the corpse, putting his hands on his knees and leaning over his lover’s shoulder when Arthur sinks back down to his haunches again. (If Gabriel breathes through his mouth, it is not so bad. Definitely not so _good_ either, but bearable for short periods.) “Can you smell anything interesting?”

“Depending on your definition of _interesting…_ ” Arthur’s nose is stuck in a disgusted wrinkle, his head lowering itself rather reluctantly closer to a patch on the ragdoll corpse’s shoulder that is more metal stitchwork than rotting flesh. “This was definitely done with magic - and quite strong stuff too, to make it work with an iron-carbon alloy. There’s an _itchy_ sort of scent residue - dead spells - around the whole body, most heavily on the stitches, but I think because the corpse was moved here using magic too? I don’t recognise the smell of the magic.” He lifts his head again, his face twisted up in a terrible grimace and his cheek bumping into Gabriel’s stomach. “I can’t tell if I’m going to sneeze or be sick.”

“Not on me, please,” says Gabriel, and gets thumped by Arthur in the leg. Deserved. Gabriel reaches down, covering the werewolf’s fist with an open palm. “Is there anything else?”

“Yeah, you’re dripping on me.” Gabriel smiles apologetically, and shifts some of his wet hair from where it has slipped over his shoulder. “And there’s…” Arthur looks back at the corpse beside him, irritably swatting away some of the flies that are still buzzing around and taking another cautious sniff of the air. “I’m not sure. Something weird?”

“Meu amor, I would like you to point me to which part of this situation is _not_ weird.”

“Yes, yes…” Arthur distractedly takes his hand back from Gabriel’s keeping, lowering his head closer to the corpse’s shoulder again. And then down its chest. “It’s… herbal?”

Gabriel is curious enough he takes the plunge and moves closer to the corpse, settling down on his haunches beside Arthur and watching the other cautiously sniff below the remains of Mr. Argl’s sternum. Arthur has to brush away maggots to do so, a sticky slime beginning to film on his gloves.

He looks up at Gabriel, frowning. “I think the body has been stuffed.”

 _“Stuffed?_ ”

“Yes, all these bumps…” Arthur shifts his hand down the remains of the corpse’s strangely lumpy chest, crossing a line of hard metal stitches from one chunk of pale flesh to a much more greenish other. More flies _buzz_ angrily. “I thought it was just gaseous bloating or bugs, but the strange smell is coming from here in particular.” His fingers find a particularly ragged joining of one piece of flesh to another, a gap wide enough between the stitches for Arthur to push his finger in and widen the tear.

Both Arthur _and_ Gabriel grimace at the horrible _squelch_ noise it makes, and a sudden frantic woodlouse scuttles out from inside the body to make a break for freedom.

“I just want you to know,” says Arthur, _staring_ Gabriel down, “that this is the most _disgusting_ thing I have ever done - and I have eaten raw deer before, Gabriel. Freshly-killed, still warm and bleeding in the dirt, _deer._ Which I tore chunks out of with my teeth.”

“And I am very grateful for your help,” Gabriel assures him. “I will make you the best bacon sandwich known to werewolf kind -”

“Fuck the sandwich,” Arthur says grimly. “After _this_ you’re taking me somewhere _incredibly expensive_ for dinner.” He pulls out his finger and _inches_ his nose unenthusiastically closer to the hole he’d made.

Gabriel… cannot really argue with that. “I’ll make a booking somewhere when we go change.” It’ll be good to get the stench of _rotting_ death out of his nose. He had been quite unprepared for such an awful thing in his night when he had first woken up that afternoon and rolled over in bed to languorously kiss Arthur awake to join him. “Got anything?”

“Yes, it’s-” Arthur stills suddenly all over, the hairs visibly prickling all over his body. Gabriel leans closer, intrigued at what could have caused the werewolf to react so, laying a balancing hand on the corpse’s chest. _“Don’t-!”_

The corpse explodes.

Something slashes past Gabriel’s throat with a tremendous _roar -_ but something else, warm and heavy, _slams_ itself into Gabriel’s chest, shoving him down hard to the ground and knocking the back of his head off the grass.

The _hurt_ hits moments later, in the sudden ringing noise that has replaced the thunder, a sharp lance of pain up Gabriel’s arm and bolting through his mind. When he slightly dazedly lifts the limb to inspect it he - squinting, the explosion has broken the lamp and the sunset is all shadows now - finds his hand and wrist have both been stabbed with long, _sharp_ needles of wood - and the one in his hand has gone straight through his glove and palm and come out the other side. His neck just under his jaw stings too, strangely warm and _wet_ in a way that feels like sticky tears sliding down his skin, and it’s hard to get his breath because he feels like a bruise and there’s something pressing down on his ribs and his head is flaring _pain, pain, pain_ at him - not all his own, on top of his own; _one of his House is hurt._

“Lord!” there is a panicked yell from outside, shrieking frantically through his skull as well as hitting his eardrums. Male. _Luciano._ _“Lord!!”_

Truth be told, Gabriel isn’t sure _what_ kind of thoughts he responds with to Luciano’s panic, but it does enough to let Luciano know he’s alive. Luciano isn’t the one who’s injured, but -

_“Lord, Renata is hurt badly!”_

Renata. _Renata_ is where the pain is coming from that isn’t Gabriel’s own, the phantom suffering of a body lanced through with wooden spikes and tiny shards of metal. The explosion had blasted through the fabric of the marquee, and Renata had been standing guard outside.

Gabriel groans, his head turning in the dirt as he broadcasts a loud and urgent mental call of _EMERGENCY_ to every vampire in his House. Some of them should have seen the explosion on the security cameras already, but the call from their lord will wake even the ones still sleeping and bring them all running. He can taste blood and burnt ozone in his mouth, the _reek_ of malevolent fresh magic and a rotting corpse blasted into rancid pieces all over the tent, all over _him,_ all over -

_Arthur._

Gabriel’s thoughts recover shamefully slowly from the _reel_ the explosion and the hard knock to his head had sent them into, but when they get there the mental panic being broadcasted by his alarmed House hits him all at once, Renata’s agony, Luciano’s terror, Antonio’s strident worry getting closer every second. His own pain is mild in comparison and takes a backseat to theirs, but his own panic hits him like a suckerpunch to his gut when he finally realises, when his attention turns to why his _stomach_ suddenly feels wet and sticky, what the weight pressing down on his ribs is: _Arthur._

Arthur had pushed Gabriel down to the ground, his head on Gabriel’s chest - and so absorbed the main of the blast from the exploding corpse, getting them both out of the way of major harm but unable to avoid everything. The slivers of wood making Gabriel’s hand and arm _throb_ with pain are kin to the ones studding Arthur’s back like the quills of a pufferfish, glinting pieces of silver metal embedded beside them. Arthur’s old, thin t-shirt had been no defence to either wood or metal, and already the wounds are welling with bright red blood, streams of it soaking through Arthur’s t-shirt and dripping onto Gabriel. Like Gabriel’s palm, some of the projectiles must have gone straight through Arthur; there is a horrible _wetness_ on Gabriel’s stomach, warm wetness, and the smell of hot iron that makes him want to throw up again, because quarter of a pint of the same liquid is still guiltily rolling around in his stomach.

If those pieces of metal in Arthur’s back are _actually silver -_

Gabriel doesn’t dare move, for fear of jolting Arthur and shifting any of the spikes or metal embedded in Arthur somewhere where it will do more damage, go from _dangerous_ to _lethal._ “Arthur,” he says, and lets his own abrupt _panic_ mentally hit every member of his House without a further care. Arthur is hurt. Arthur is _mortal._ The world is rushing around Gabriel and he can’t hear anything but his own blood thumping in his temples. More desperately: _“Arthur,_ querido.”

Arthur doesn’t move, but low, quiet, buried against his chest, Gabriel hears a thin, pained _whine_.

“ _Shhh,”_ Gabriel soothes him, mentally hunts for his uninjured hand and finds it trapped under Arthur’s body. So he brings his injured hand up to Arthur’s head instead, running his fingers very carefully through Arthur’s soft, still-damp hair. It _hurts_ to do so, and Gabriel bleeds all over himself and his lover, but. He cannot _not_ do it, offer some comfort to the one part of Arthur he can’t see any wounds on, keeping his voice as gentle as he can manage whilst his mind runs into panic. “Don’t move, meu coração, alright?”

Arthur whines again, and Gabriel can hear a mass of feet running in the garden outside the marquee. A mess of noise and worry.

“Don’t move,” Gabriel tells Arthur again, and then the tent-flap is flung open to the last of sunset and help.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone suffers the fallout from a magical exploding corpse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rodrigo/Rui is Macau
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** SFW, but mentions of blood, and set in a hospital environment with appropriate machines and medicines. Injuries, though they’re all bandaged up, and one instance of deliberate aggravation of another’s injury. Contemplations of mortality and semi-immortality.

**Terminology and Fact File:**   


  * _Witch:_ a human with any kind of magical power. Unless aided or otherwise affected by magic, a witch will live an average human life in respects to their health and longevity, with the same potential for abilities, disease and disability as a human without magical powers. Witches who use malevolent magic tend to suffer from issues relating to their health and lifespan, as do witches who consistently overuse their powers, as, when the magic runs dry, many witches are able to draw at their own vitality instead. There are a few cases of witches dying from magical overuse because of this. Magical powers tend to run in human bloodlines, and powers can survive death, inhabiting the vestiges of a witch’s corpse and, occasionally, their spirit: for this reason, many witches prefer to be cremated after death, to avoid their corpses becoming susceptible to necromancy and being brought back as a zombie, ghoul, or ghost. No witch’s powers have, as yet, survived transformation into another living being - i.e, becoming a vampire or werewolf.
  * _Pack witch:_ technically speaking, this refers to any witch attached to a werewolf pack. The term is, however, predominantly used by werewolves to refer to the _principle_ witch of a pack: the ‘head’ witch that is consulted by the alpha/alpha pair of the pack for advice and assistance. In - the not uncommon - cases where there is more than one witch attached to a pack, it is not always the most powerful witch that is considered _the_ pack witch.



 

 

* * *

 

 

Arthur wakes feeling a little cold and vaguely annoyed. The cold is fairly self-explanatory, since when he slowly blinks his eyes open he can see - and feel - that his arms and upper body are bare, the hairs prickling in a long shiver across his skin, but his thoughts are sleepy, muddled, and it takes some time for him to slowly parse through them to realise why he feels so disgruntled.

Something nearby is _beeping_ at him.

Arthur squints blearily, trying to work out _what_ could be beeping so rhythmically at him when he has half his face buried in a pillow and can’t see much more than a grey plastic chair, bedside cabinet and wall in front of him. It doesn’t sound like his alarm clock - he hasn’t used an alarm clock since he left his brother’s house anyway -, but its strident repetitive tones are definitely something mechanical, cutting through his skull and nagging a sore point in his belly with a clock’s persistent precision. Gabriel can’t have gotten an alarm clock either (if he has, Arthur is going to throw it at his thick head); Gabriel hates waking up more than Arthur does.

But then - Arthur isn’t in his bedroom. Not the one he shares with Gabriel, and not even his old childhood bedroom in the Kirkland home. Even if he had _somehow_ managed to sleep through someone sneaking into his room and replacing all the furniture whilst he was out, the room is too bright for either, white, sharpness that swims in fragments between the protective shutter of Arthur’s eyelashes, and the room smells…

Well. The room smells familiar enough Arthur’s hackles don’t rise by instinct, but it’s not familiar enough to be _comfortable._ The floor smells of lemon-scented bleach. Everything else - including the mattress under Arthur’s body and the pillow under Arthur’s cheek - smells _clinical._

He’s in a hospital then. Or, much more likely, in one of the little private medical rooms kept in the basement of Gabriel’s home, because the faint scent Arthur is getting in the air, over all the bleach and sterilisation, is that of _vampires,_ and vampires he knows quite well at that. (Even vampires occasionally require medical attention. Even if it’s just to grab some pain relief until their wounds fade and a missing limb grows back.) Since the medical stores and private wards are just along from the house’s _morgue,_ it would explain why Arthur feels so damn cold as well.

“Good morning,” says a voice. The vampire smell is stronger.

Arthur _knows_ that voice. Frustratingly, he can’t immediately put a name or face to it, though he knows he knows both; the thoughts keep slipping away from his grasp, too quick for his still-sluggish thinking.

“Something is _beeping,_ ” he growls thickly as a response, squinting again in search of his companion, and is somewhat horrified because his voice is more gravelly cracks than actual words.

“Your heart monitor,” says the voice, calm as you’d please, and obliges Arthur by walking into his line of vision, a skinny creature made up of nothing but grey jeans and a black turtleneck until he sits down on the even greyer plastic chair. “Please don’t try to move; you will aggravate your injuries.”

Arthur hadn’t even realised he was trying to lift his face and upper body from the bed. His back stings, a needling heat that doesn’t warm him sliding down his spine between his shoulderblades. “…Rodrigo?”

Rodrigo, still calm, motions for Arthur to lie still again. Can’t stop the heart monitor from beeping, no; it’d mean Arthur’s dead.

Arthur lies stills, allowing his body to settle back into the unfamiliar plasticy-sounding mattress underneath it again. His face, however, is not so buried in the pillow. He can see the vampire sitting beside his bed much better now - although, admittedly, he is both reassured and rather unhappy about Rodrigo even _being_ there, because Rodrigo’s presence means that Arthur’s injuries are likely serious.

Despite being one of the oldest vampires in Gabriel’s House, Turned as a child by Gabriel sometime in the late sixteenth century, Rodrigo barely looks like he’s twenty. Arthur has heard the vampire’s brothers and sisters try and tease him for it before, but the words roll off of Rodrigo like water off a duck’s back. The Chinese part of Rodrigo’s mixed heritage has left him smooth black hair, a slender frame and a now eternally youthful face, his smile a secret thing behind the long sleeves he prefers to wear and his slanted eyes a rich, tawny shade of brown behind the tinted lenses of his glasses.

A few of the House call him _Rui_. Even more, teasingly, call him _doctor,_ because Rodrigo is one of the only vampires in the House with any serious medical knowledge: he had wanted, Gabriel had explained once, when Arthur had asked why Rodrigo knew how to patch Feliciano up after an incident involving a knife in the kitchen, to go to school. And then to university. And _then_ on to further medical studies. Had argued for it more passionately than Gabriel had seen his Rui argue for almost anything in five centuries, and what real reason had Gabriel had to try and stop him? It was - and very much still is - _useful_ to have someone with medical training around, and Rodrigo had stopped having serious problems with walking around in the daylight by his second century, quite able to attend his classes.

Arthur’s back stings very badly, and something is throbbing dully in his stomach. His head hurts - and yet all of it still feels very distant to him, his brain registering all the pain but not quite allowing it to sink into his body, something thick and pillowy between hurt and consequence.

…His sister, Caitlyn, had described a similar feeling once. When she’d been in hospital, after being hit by a car in her wolf form. Running in the woods. There’d been bodily trauma even when she’d shifted back to her human skin (saying nothing of the state of the state of the car), blood on the road and rusting in her auburn hair, so in the hospital they’d given her their heavy-duty drugs. For the pain.

“…You’ve given me opiates,” Arthur surmises, his voice still aching. It’s why his thoughts are so hard to put in order, to keep hold of. Why the pain is _there_ but not _quite_ there, a splintered glass wall between the two places, and why he’s being so distracted by the little things like brightness and chairs and Rodrigo. There’s something -

“Yes, among other things. If you had lost any more blood than you did we might have had to consider a transfusion, but I think, with your werewolf healing abilities, we should be fine with just fluids and medication.” Rodrigo offers Arthur a glass from the bedside cabinet, half-full with clear liquid and a purple straw. Lowers it, so the straw butts up against Arthur’s mouth. “I had to call your brother for access to your medical records.”

“‘Brother,’” says Arthur, garbled around the straw. He closes his eyes again, trying to focus on anything but _beeping_ . The liquid - water - in the glass is lukewarm, but a wet relief to his rasping throat. “Iain?”

Rodrigo’s brow creases in something vaguely like sympathy. “The alpha.”

“Should’ve spoken to my sister-in-law if you wanted to get yelled at by an alpha,” Arthur slurs, and pushes the straw back out of his mouth with his tongue. That’s enough water for now; there’s something he’s supposed to be thinking about. “Says more with pursed lips than Iain does lecturing for an hour.”

Rodrigo laughs - almost -, a little sound in the back of his throat. Arthur smiles drowsily, pleased to get a reaction out of him. “I’m afraid to say that I handed the phone to Antonio as soon as I could, so I may have missed the full experience for either. Patients take priority.”

Patients…

Arthur’s eyes snap open and his back stiffens, sharp and sudden enough a jolt of pain lances straight to his head. _“Gabriel -_ ”

The rotting body on the lawn. Gabriel crouched beside him, idiotic and unknowing. The old magic, the raw magic, that _smell,_ and then the _explosion -_

Rodrigo has his hand on Arthur’s arm, back, trying to push him down as Arthur tries to struggle up from the bed. It hurts, it hurts a _lot -_ Arthur pushes back instinctively, feels hurt shriek through his chest and abdomen and sing sharply in his bones to the tune of wild, frantic beeping, something tugging at the hand he’d been turned away from, his legs tangled in starched sheets. His back and arm and shoulders and hips are on _fire,_ but Gabriel -

Gabriel isn’t there; the spell had been meant for Gabriel and Arthur hadn’t -

“The lord is _fine!”_ Rodrigo has his voice raised, struggling to try and cover Arthur with his body to push down because Arthur is taking every spare bit of air he can see as an opportunity to try and escape the bed, the tugging on his hands and tangle around his legs, to escape Rodrigo because he can beat the vampire in a fight, possibly, if necessary, and it’s very necessary to Arthur to find Gabriel _right now_ and check the _idiotic_ vampire lord isn’t slowly bleeding out alone somewhere because a malicious spell probably sent by the ghosts of vengeful fashion police tried to blast his fat fanged head off. _“Arthur,_ I swear to you that he’s _fine!”_

“Alive?” Arthur demands.

“Alive!” Rodrigo answers. “You took most of the injuries for him -”

“Uninjured?”

Rodrigo’s mouth closes.

Arthur begins struggling again. His hand - he has a _thing_ on his thumb attached to the annoying beeping machine and a cannula in the back of his hand, connected by a tube to a half-full drip-bag and infusion pump. It’s why moving his hand is so awkward, the infusion pump joining the heart monitor in beeping angrily at him for disturbing the flow of liquids entering his bloodstream by daring to bend his wrist.

“The injuries aren’t _serious,_ ” says Rodrigo, and sounds perhaps the most desperate Arthur has ever heard him. “Yours are much worse - _please_ lay down calmly? If you injure yourself further trying to get up it’s _me_ he’ll get angry with.”

Arthur looks at the vampire dubiously, compromising by stilling somewhere on his hands and knees and pretending that his arms aren’t shaking trying to hold his strangely heavy upper body weight. (Drugs.) “I have _never_ seen him angry with you.”

The statement is a distraction. Something very small and lost and childishly petulant is crying close to a whine in Arthur’s throat: if Gabriel is relatively uninjured, why is he not _there?_

“With all due respect, you did not see my childhood.” With Arthur a little calmer, woeful around the edges, Rodrigo takes a chance to take his hand from Arthur’s shoulder and push up his glasses where they are sliding helplessly down his nose. “You really need to move as little as possible, or you may end up doing permanent damage to your back. I’m not too sure how injuries match up when you change between humanoid and wolf form, but if the tissue on your back doesn’t heal correctly, you may have problems running as a wolf. And definite stiffness as a human.”

On all fours, Arthur can feel _exactly_ what Rodrigo means. The skin between his shoulderblades is pulling tight and angry against the movement of his arms, a deep, hot throbbing that burns and spreads through his ribcage, joining the sharp _ache_ already emanating from his belly. “Get Gabriel and I’ll lie down.”

“Lay down and promise to stay down while I am gone,” Rodrigo counters, “and I will go get him.”

“Now?” Arthur asks. There are tears prickling at the corner of his eyes and he isn’t sure why.

“Now,” Rodrigo promises him.

Arthur lays down, trying not to sigh too obviously when his head touches the pillow again and some of the tension eases from his body. Even more of it leaves him when he sees Rodrigo leave the room on his errand, comforted at the thought of being able to check Gabriel’s injuries for himself. For a werewolf, seeing - and smelling - is really believing.

Even with the pain and beeping, Arthur dozes. He isn’t sure for how long, or even the precise point he drifts off, but he goes from hazy, nervy formless dreams to suddenly blinking awake again, the seat beside his bed once more occupied.

Gabriel smiles at him, small and soft and clearly tired, but still sincere enough that it crinkles the skin around the corner of his eyes. “Good afternoon.”

Stupidly, silently, Arthur stares back at him. At Gabriel’s hand atop his hand on the bed, his gaze slowly following the line of the vampire lord’s arm up to the strange white choker wrapped around Gabriel’s neck. It’s a lot thicker and uglier than Arthur’s collar, and Arthur dislikes it immediately.

Even more so when it eventually clicks that he’s looking at _bandages_ around his lover’s neck, not a choker, and there are even more bandages around Gabriel’s other arm - something Gabriel is probably trying to hide from him, since he shifts his wrapped arm away from Arthur’s sight when he leans in closer to the bed, moving his touch from Arthur’s hand to tenderly cup his cheek instead.

“Rodrigo said you were upset.”

Arthur will give Gabriel _upset._ When he breathes in, lips pulling back from his teeth in an irritated warning, he can smell Gabriel, Gabriel and, he realises rather dully, another familiar vampire, Antonio, who must be hovering elsewhere in the little room, and Gabriel smells of his own blood and medicines that burn the air rather than his usual more mellow musk. _Both_ vampires smell of bitter anger and sour fear-sweat, and Antonio in particular still carries the stink of malevolent magic on his clothes, as well as the rotten flesh of the corpse that has caused them so much trouble.

“Why are you still injured?” Arthur’s voice is still rough, but he forces it out anyway. Doesn’t bother to look for Antonio, though he can hear the vampire shifting his weight from foot to foot on the squeaky floor. “Your healing rate is much faster than mine.”

Caught, Gabriel winces, and the pads of his fingers rasp over Arthur’s cheek, catching on rough skin and dried wetness from the corners of Arthur’s eyes. Francis’ sodding lilies might inconvenience Arthur’s werewolf nose, but not opiates. “Ah, it seems the projectiles stuffed inside the body were chosen for maximum effect against vampires. Hawthorn and wild rose spikes, and they and the metal were coated in bad blood. With such a little dose though, it just makes for slow healing, annoyingly.”

 _Annoyingly._ Arthur’s lips pull back further, a soundless snarl. “It could’ve killed you!”

Antonio makes a low, bitter sound at that - Arthur chooses to take it as angry agreement -, but Gabriel speaks over them both, his gaze still focused fierce and close on Arthur despite the teeth. “It did not, because of you. I-”

Something closes hard in Gabriel’s throat. Arthur watches it stonily, hurt and angry, a weighty swallow that moves Gabriel’s Adam’s apple in a bob and still sits thickly on Gabriel’s tongue when he can prise out words once more:

“Arthur, don’t ever do that again - it could have killed _you._ What if there had been silver in the blast? Wolfsbane?” Gabriel has to feel the almost-vibration of Arthur’s snarl at him, the rising indignation at the vampire lord’s hypocrisy. “You’re so badly hurt and it was clearly not even _meant_ to hurt you - if there had been something in there specifically aimed at werewolves you’d be dead. You’re _mortal,_ and I-”

The sour fear-sweat smell is stronger now, Gabriel’s, and the bubbling pit of confusion that is Arthur’s emotions at that moment cannot take the addition on top of everything else, cannot take _these_ feelings from Gabriel on top of everything else -

“You’re mortal,” Gabriel says again, and it’s like he’s already standing over Arthur’s grave.

Arthur cracks and shoves Gabriel’s hand off of him, pushing himself up off of the mattress again in a less-than-sinuous twist of limbs and tubing. “You think you’re so much more invincible than I am?!”

“That is _not -_ ”

“If you think for _one bloody minute_ -”

“Please, lie down -”

“Then _listen to me!”_ Arthur snaps, and, pain or not, pushes at the hands Gabriel is trying to settle on his shoulders to get him to lie flat on the bed again. The sight of the white bandages wrapped around the vampire’s hand and forearm just makes Arthur more annoyed. “I might just be some lowly _mortal_ werewolf -”

“ _Arthur,_ that is not -”

Arthur grabs at Gabriel’s wrist - the injured one, his thumb pressing hard against bone and the beat of Gabriel’s pulse beneath the bandages. It must hurt, for Gabriel rears back instinctively and almost drags Arthur straight off the bed and onto his own lap, his words dying in a pained _hiss_ and flash of his own fangs. “ _I’m still talking._ ”

Silence falls then, save the beeping: silence enough for Arthur to try and untangle his own limbs and not faceplant straight into Gabriel’s chest, for Gabriel’s mouth to snap closed as his lips thin - and for Arthur to remember Antonio is still in the room, his steps slightly too-casual as he approaches from the other side of the room to finally walk into Arthur’s view, taking up a solid unimpressed position behind his brother. He still reeks, overpowering the lemon bleach smell of the room.

Carefully, but currently without regret, Arthur releases his grip on Gabriel’s wrist. Sitting like this makes his chest hurt in such a way it’s hard to draw a full breath into his lungs. “Even I,” he says a lot more quietly, subdued by the atmosphere as well as the pain streaking down his back, “know that vampiric immortality comes with rules attached. Vampires die when they are killed, when they are too seriously injured all at once to repair themselves, and they _stay_ dead.”

Arthur curls in on himself a little, instinctively trying to ease the tight pressure across his back, the hot ache throbbing in his middle. To his own vague dismay, the hand he’d laid on Gabriel has now risen to splay itself rather protectively around the base of his own throat, which is currently missing the reassuring weight of his collar. It’s not a submissive gesture among werewolves - _or_ vampires -, nor a penitent one, but too obviously defensive for Arthur’s comfort. If the collar were there… Well, it’d still be bad if the collar were there.

Arthur has no idea where his collar _is._

“I smelled it, you know?” he says. “The… spell-bomb. Magic. Hex. For just a moment. It smelled just a little bit like you, and I’ve known witches long enough to know that that meant it was most likely a spell focused on you.” His gaze flicks up rather aggressively at the two vampires in front of him again, not prepared to take another bout of hypocrisy. “I don’t regret what I did.”

Antonio, his face still far more serious than Arthur is used to seeing it, just nods at him. He and Arthur now get along much better than they used to: Antonio has stopped both protesting Arthur’s presence in his brother’s life, House and bed, and complaining about a werewolf’s influence over the ‘young _impressionable_ vampires’ in the House, and Arthur has stopped deliberately shedding wolf fur all over Antonio’s belongings and/or burying them in hard-to-reach places in the garden. Their relationship now is one of fairly friendly, mostly grumbling, exasperated fondness - and unspoken, absolute agreement that they’d throw the other one under the proverbial bus if it meant putting Gabriel’s life first. Arthur has done nothing that he knows Antonio wouldn’t have done, and the both of them know it.

Gabriel has missed that memo. He reaches out for Arthur again, touch-starved by increments, and settles his palm wide and warm over the muscle of Arthur’s thigh. “Please don’t do it again.”

“Don’t make me have to,” Arthur says, but lets the last of the fight drain out of him. He feels tired. Heavy. He should probably lie down again. “…What did you do to piss off a witch?”

Soothingly, Gabriel rubs at his leg. “Nothing, to my knowledge.” Both Arthur and Antonio give him disbelieving looks and Gabriel has the gall to look (emotionally) _wounded_. “I mean it! Arthur, when you say the spell _smelled_ like me…”

“Just a bit.” Arthur’s shoulders sink a little bit more, and he casts his gaze around to see if Rodrigo has left him any water. He’d never need to explain this to werewolves. “Mostly magic smells like its age and power and intent, and each witch has a particular scent to their magic that is pretty unique to them and them alone. The bit of you in it smelled like blood.”

“Blood,” says Gabriel, with the strangest tone Arthur has ever heard him use on that word.

“Your blood?” Arthur clarifies, a little lost at the need to explain _blood_ to a _vampire._ “Blood can be used as a spell component, quite often to focus a spell on a particular target. Blood magic is vicious. Mostly used for curses, I think.” An exploding corpse probably counts as a curse, not that Arthur has had much experience with either before this instance.

Lip curled and sharp fangs displayed, Antonio’s displeasure is showing. “ _No-one_ should have access to his blood, let alone a _witch._ ”

Distracted by that information, Arthur stops looking for water and focuses on the vampires with him, Gabriel tipping his head back over his seat to look at his brother. “Toniho -”

“ _No,_ hermano,” Antonio cuts him short, “things need to be asked.” Antonio frowns at Arthur, for once every inch the authoritative second-in-command of the House that he rarely seems to be. “How would a witch get his blood? How _much_ blood would be needed for that blast?”

Arthur blinks at him. “You’re asking me?”

“It’s _werewolves_ that witches like, not vampires.”

Arthur stares incredulously. “…You’re _blaming_ me?!”

Antonio’s arms unfold, a restless movement and too-quick movements of his fingers. “We have a few witches living in our territory, but there have been no real incidents with any of them in _years._ Nothing big enough for attempted murder of a vampire lord. But you -”

“What _about_ me?” Arthur had thought he was done with being angry, but. Apparently _not._ It’s exhausting, and his voice is close to cracking again, rough from too much talking. And yelling. “You don’t think your stupid brother is capable of making people want to kill him _without_ my help?!”

Gabriel pouts. “Oi -”

Arthur ignores him, lifting his hand from his throat so he can slam his palms down aggressively on the bed. “I had nothing to do with this. Fuck you.”

Gabriel tries to take his hand again. This time, Arthur lets him, though he is not at all mollified by the thumb sweeping gently across the backs of his knuckles. “Antonio was not blaming you, lobinho. His choice of words was so poor because he is worried; you know how he is. Usually we know _why_ someone is mad at us.”

Arthur shifts and bares his teeth at him again half-heartedly, more as a show of grumbling than actual aggression. Arthur is owed _so_ much pampering after this, not to mention the dinner that Gabriel had promised him out on the lawn. _And_ he’s going to bury Antonio’s pillows in the compost beside the vegetable patch.

Gabriel just keeps stroking his hand, being unreasonably reasonable. “As a werewolf, you _do_ have better knowledge of witches than us; it’s well-known they often attach themselves to werewolf packs.”

“I know a few,” Arthur concedes, “yes.” He _likes_ witches. For the most part, witches make useful friends, and are wonderful casual company. One of his old girlfriends had been a witch, and her magic had come in useful when Arthur had gone through what his siblings had called ‘his _phase’_ and dyed his hair several particularly violent shades of the rainbow.

God, defending a few witches had been what had brought Arthur to Gabriel’s attention in the _first_ place - that, handing one of Gabriel’s vampires their arse in a fight, and the good solid kick he’d gotten in to the vampire lord’s balls right before Gabriel had threatened, flirted with and then subsequently flattened him.

“There was a stone,” says Antonio, abruptly enough Arthur wearily bristles at him. “We picked it up from amidst the wreckage on the lawn.” Which might explain why Antonio still smells like bad magic and rotting flesh, _lovely._ Had he been poking around whatever bits must be left scattered on their lawn? “It _looks_ like something a witch would make. It has markings on it, and it is stained with blood.”

“This idiot’s?” asks Arthur, head tipped ever more sleepily towards Gabriel (who just makes a face back at him). It would be more helpful if Antonio would actually bring out this _stone_ for Arthur to look at, but Antonio does not appear to be forthcoming. Irritably, Antonio shrugs back at him - everything today has, for obvious reasons, put him in a terrible mood. “Probably this idiot’s.”

On any other day, Arthur would be charmed by how quickly Gabriel adapts to being consistently called an idiot. Today, focusing on the vampire lord’s words are a hard enough task.

“We will need to talk to someone discreet. Can you recommend anyone?”

Arthur gives in to the inevitable, and starts shifting again so he can lie down, noisy plastic mattress under the bedsheets or not. Let the tributaries come to Rome, not Rome to the tributaries. Or something. There’s a quote like that, isn’t there? “…You want a fairly powerful witch with good connections for this. And definitely not one associated with any particular community?”

Gabriel helpfully lifts the tubing so it didn’t get tangled around Arthur’s arm, death-glaring the infusion pump when it lets out a single angry _beep_ at being jostled. Arthur loves this idiot. “I think you can appreciate why it might be in our best interests to avoid telling everyone that a vampire lord was attacked in his own home.”

“Technically,” says Antonio, ever helpful, “it was in his own garden.”

Arthur ignores him just as much as Gabriel does, the vampire lord of debate still shuffling around with the tubing as Arthur tries to get comfortable without pulling at the cannula in his hand. “If you don’t want to go to the Kirkland pack witch, I know three witch siblings that could help. They’re very good, but they do charge to match their skills.”

“Money is not an issue.” Gabriel speaks with all the assurance of one who has built up interest on their investments over _centuries._ Arthur hates him for it, just a little bit. Werewolves are expected to get _careers._ “Their address?”

Tired, Arthur shakes his head - although the effect is ruined by his face-down position, ending up doing little more than nuzzle into his medicinal-smelling pillow. “That won’t work. They hate vampires, and they live in werewolf territory. I’d have to introduce and vouch for you.”

Gabriel finishes fiddling with the tubing at last, easing some of the pinch in Arthur’s veins. “ _You_ are not allowed to leave this bed for at least a week.”

“Then you’ll have to wait. Or consider another witch.”

Two vampires sigh overhead, but Arthur is zoning out too much to care about it. He’s annoyed, yes, truly, but nobody he gives a shit about is currently in immediate danger and he _hurts,_ so he feels fully entitled to drift off.

“…Tell me,” says Gabriel at last, taking up his seat at Arthur’s bedside again. “In your opinion, are these witch siblings worth waiting for for this?”

“…They’re the best I know,” says Arthur, which is the truth. The Kirkland pack has some good connections, and it isn’t considered shameless for any member - or former member, provided they had not been expelled from the pack in disgrace - of the pack to draw on them at will. That is what _pack_ is about. “And they’re old friends,” loosely speaking in the case of one of the siblings, but that’s just splitting hairs, “so I can swear to you that they’ll keep this business a secret.”

Antonio and Gabriel speak so more, quietly, a background murmur like a television set in another room, and it lulls Arthur into enough of a doze he doesn’t notice when Antonio leaves the room, or even how long Antonio has been gone. When his eyes slide muzzily apart again the room only actively smells of lemons, Arthur, and Gabriel, the scents of Antonio and Rodrigo muted beneath the two still present.

Gabriel is reading the terrible trash romance novel that had been cluttering up his bedside cabinet for a week now, his bandaged hand a little awkward around the spine. The book’s lurid cover looks particularly weird in the middle of a cool white hospital room, too bright against the starkness of its surroundings - and too bright against Gabriel’s complexion.

Even discounting the bandages, Gabriel looks tired.

“…Are you really alright?” Arthur’s voice cracks in the middle, his throat dry.

Gabriel startles like it’s the crack of a whip, the book sliding through his hands and landing on the floor with a _clack-thump._ He brightens when he sees Arthur looking at him, leaving the book on the floor to fetch - God be praised - _water,_ another glass with another straw in it held up to Arthur’s lips. Arthur is developing an appreciation for straws.

“I will be healed much earlier than you,” Gabriel says as Arthur drinks eagerly, Arthur smiling crookedly around the straw in his mouth when his lover attempts to look reproachful. “Meu amor, at least look a _little_ sorry for getting hurt. Do you know what you do to my heart?”

Arthur breathes, licking his lips to wet them and not at all sorry. When he is impulsive, it is wholehearted, and, for all his injuries, he cannot think he would have picked another course than the one he did. “You know what you do to mine?” He’s slurring.

Gabriel sighs at him, and takes away the glass when Arthur shakes his head at it being offered to him again, too busy snuggling back down into his pillow. “Remind you that you have one, I think.” He replaces the glass with himself - smelling more like _himself_ again, to Arthur’s quiet satisfaction, amber and vanilla under the stress of the day -, a kiss laid on Arthur’s forehead that Arthur drowsily wants to drown in, the warmth and familiarity of it as much a comfort as rolling around naked in their bed-linen upstairs. “Thank you. But please never make me stand in the shower and wash off so much of your blood ever again. I don’t know how to lose things.”

Arthur smiles at him, aware that it a loose, somewhat sloppy expression as his eyes slide shut again, a rumble of happiness in his throat at the touch of Gabriel’s warm hand on his nape. Not _quite_ as good as his collar, but good. Very good. Christ, Arthur’s tired. “You underestimate my stubbornness.”

“As you like to remind me,” Gabriel sighs at him - again -, and his thumb runs back and forth, sure and steady, over the pulse in Arthur’s neck until Arthur, once more, falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're looking for more, there's [my tag for this AU on tumblr](https://shachaai.tumblr.com/tagged/bb%3A-wptg), which contains my rambling, general inspiration, and reblogs of all of Hoof's fantastic art relating to this AU.
> 
> Alternatively, please go [check out Hoof and her work directly on tumblr](https://hoofae.tumblr.com/)! She's a fantastic artist, and deserves all the love.


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